Drinkers will be persecuted
Rochester, Kent
,Here's a sorrowful affliction . . . it makes a vessel's heart bleed . . . all taps is wanitys . . . I despise them all. If . . there is any of them less odious than another, it is the liquor called rum — warm, my dear young friend, with three lumps. of sugar to the tumbler.' Reverend Stiggins, Shepherd of the Brick Lane Branch of the United Grand Junction Ebenezer Temperance Association.(Pickwick Papers).
There were two good jokes at the time of the festival of a child born in a manger. The social workers went on a go-slow to support some wage demand, with a result that thousands of children in council `care' were thrown out of their hostels and those that remained were doubtless given sullen treat- ment. And the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, the most lucrative of the `charities' in the birth-control and abortion industry, announced an emergency service over the Christmas holidays to provide women with morning-after birth control pills. A spokeswoman for this 'charity', Mrs Diane Munday, announced: `Post-coital morning- after contraception will be available and speedy use of this may prevent the birth of an unwanted child or an abortion when the Christmas festivities are long forgotten.' For unto us a child is taken away . . .
Although the Sex Industry flourishes over Christmas like the IRA, it looks as though still more money is now to be made out of the anti-alcoholism industry. It is significant that Colin Brewer, who started the British Pregnancy Advisory Service with Dr Martin Cole, the Birmingham eugenecist, and the aforesaid Mrs Munday — and went on to campaign for the euthanasia society EXIT — has now emerged as a spokesman on the danger of alcoholism. All these quangos on alcoholism peddle different and often con- tradictory cures, but agree that people will not and cannot reduce or stop drinking without the benefit of their expertise, for which they are paid enormous salaries out of the income tax and rates.
The anti-alcohol quangos are now so powerful that this Christmas and New Year they persuaded several police forces to turn their personnel and energy away from the prevention of crime and IRA terrorism to the persecution of drivers who drink. In Essex a number of motorists who were found to have drunk more than the legal limit were sent to prison as well as having to pay fines of around £250. They had not been charged with reckless or dangerous driving, only with drinking. Motorists who drive dangerously, for instance those who refuse to stop at zebra crossings, are seldom even arrested. A recent TV documentary showed that motorists who actually kill pedestrians are likely to pay a fine of no more than £50 and will not go to prison. This persecution of drinkers comes at a time when accidents from drunken driving are fewer than they have ever been, and people in England are drinking less than they ever drank.
The English drink only half as much as they did a hundred years ago: so I learn from a most entertaining new book, Con- vivial Dickens. The Drinks of Dickens and His Times, by Edward Hewett and W. F. Axton (Ohio University Press, Gower Street, London, WC1, cloth £16.15, paper- back £9.35). And even a hundred years ago the English were much more sober than they had been before the tax was removed on beer, and people went on to this milder drink instead of the rot-gut gin. The tax on beer was removed in 1836, when Dickens started to write The Pickwick Papers, but almost everyone in the book indulges in every kind of alcohol. The greatest boozer of the lot was Tony Weller, a coachman by profession. When Mr Pickwick and friends set off for the Christmas party at Dingley Dell, somewhere near Rochester, `The guard and Mr Weller [Sam Weller, that is] disappear for five minutes, most probably to get the hot brandy and water, for they smell very strongly of it when they return ...'. This year, they would have spent their Christmas in Rochester jail. At the Bull Hotel here, the very same one where Mr Pickwick and friends got splen- didly tight, the barmaid told me: `We're not getting many people this year ... They're lazy and won't go anywhere except in their cars, and this year the police are doing them. They've got police blocks on the bridge and the Chatham road. They're not just checking for alcohol. They're searching the boot and all. They're looking for stolen things at this time of year, like videos.'
At another old pub, the landlord said that people now went out only in taxis, because they are frightened of the police. But he said that people could no longer af- ford the price of drink, especially alcohol. Several Rochester pubs have closed since I was last here, three years ago. Also the big brewers seem to have a monopoly in this part of Kent; the beer is probably not as good as when Miss Favisham owned the Rochester brewery.
Oliver Cromwell, who banned the celebration of Christmas, is often unjustly accused of trying to stamp out drinking. On the contrary, his loathsome troopers were almost' invariably drunk when they went round vandalising the churches. There were anti-smoking fanatics back in the 17th cen- tury and, so I learn from Convivial Dickens, the 18th-century English chose their drink on political grounds. The Whigs who supported the constitution drank sherry and port, while Stuarts and Tories preferred the more expensive French wines and brandy. The teetotal movement started late in the 18th century, with the increasing consumption of cheap gin, or `bingo', `max',`Jacky', 'cogue', `Shove-in-the- mouth' or `Nancy Clark'. One of the pubs near Dickens's house (and the Spectator) in Doughty Street, the Lamb in Lamb's Con- duit Street, was a flourishing gin palace, and may be the local patronised by Sarah Gamp. Rum was also a cheap drink, and the one preferred by the teetotal preacher, the Reverend Mr Stiggins. When he visits Mr Pickwick in prison and cannot get his favourite pineapple rum, he agrees to a substitute of `a bottle of port wine, warmed with a little water, spice and sugar, as being grateful to the stomach, and savouring less of wanity than many other compounds'.
Although Dickens was not a heavy drinker, he greatly disapproved of the temperance movement and he reproached those friends of his, such as Cruikshank, who went on the wagon. He would not ap- prove of modern Rochester, or DingleY Dell, if he made his way through police road blocks and picketing social workers td where one of the Misses Wardle is glurnlY swigging her morning-after pill in slimline tonic.
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